Jonathon Stillman

Associate Adjunct Professor

Research Description

Our research focuses on understanding the ultimate and proximate causes of physiological diversity in relation to changes in the marine environment, and understanding the ecological consequences of physiological response limits in the context of climate change. We study a broad diversity of marine organisms, including porcelain crabs, corals, coccolithophores, and clams. Our research blends in vivo physiology, such as cardiac activity or metabolic rate, with protein biochemistry, including proteomics, enzymology and protein structure-function relationships, and we use functional genomics, specifically transcriptome profiling using cDNA microarrays and RNA-seq, to elucidate the mechanistic bases for physiological plasticity and diversity.

Projects currently underway in our laboratory are focused on understanding how porcelain crabs, king crabs, and coccolithophores respond to ocean acidification, examination of the combined effects of ocean acidification with other environmental drives such as temperature and nutrients in crabs and coccolithophores, study of the effects of environmental variability on an invasive clam in San Francisco Bay, and in the near future we will begin to examine the effects of climate change on aquatic insects.